Amplify & Ignite: Creative Practice in and With Communities

Please make sure to add this session to your schedule if you intend to attend.

Lunch Provided: In this workshop, Imagining America (IA) staff will create space for co-learning and collective dialogue at the critical intersections of public scholarship, cultural organizing, and institutional change. Inspired by an IA action research report Critical Intersections: Public Scholars Creating Culture, Catalyzing Change, workshop facilitators will introduce creative tools meant to spark conversation and support action about the joys, contributions, and struggles of public scholars and artists: the IA Public Scholar Conversation Cards and the Organizing Culture Change Public Scholar Imagination Guide. This interactive workshop will then give participants a chance to play with and learn together from these tools. The card deck encourages public scholars to consider why their work matters and how it challenges academic culture and produces critical knowledge to tackle pressing public issues. The guide provides a variety of reflection and action activities for anyone trying to improve their own practice and for those interested in making higher education a more hospitable, caring, and creative place to nurture public, engaged, and activist scholarship, artmaking, and design. Through facilitated conversations, peer sharing, and play, participants will develop a more expansive understanding of what kinds of knowledge matters and how to nurture supportive relationships and environments for public scholars to thrive.

Participants will then be invited to use the blank cards included in the Public Scholar Conversation Cards deck to strategize and co-create a new set of prompts drawn from collective exploration in the session, from participants' individual experiences in the performing arts, and from the shared engagement at the Amplify & Ignite Symposium.